Nostalgia in Programming
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I worked on an IBM 360/40 with 256k core memory. There were a few disks, but a majority of our work was done with tape. Do you remember how to do a master file update with the master on one tape drive and the updates on another tape drive with the new master going to a third tape drive? Needless to say, I preferred the PDP-11/20 I mentioned in another post.
I left off that I was a 7094 tape jockey (in the same window). That was a 32k machine with a card reader the size of a very large generator and 14 tape drives. It billed out @ $700/hr. The OS (IBSYS) was on 1 tape. IBM did all their 360 simulations on the 7094. To make life a little easier we had a utility program (on 1 card) that rewound all the tapes at once so we didn't have to walk around and do it by hand.
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StarNamer_ wrote:
I remember that about 30 years ago
It was the early 1970's and it was a PDP8 if my memory serves me correctly. It used to drop out a lot so I got pretty good at doing it also. :cool:
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
I'm on-line therefore I am. JimmyRopesI was at Manchester University in the Physics Department from 1978 to 1986 as a Research Associate so it would have been either 1979 or 1980 and it was definitely a PDP-11 that we had. I also used a PDP-8 (and a PDP-10) in 1974/5/6 as an undergraduate at Oxford. Also a PDP-7, a PDP-9 and a PDP-15 while at Manchester. All of them were 'proper' computers with a panel of lights and a row of toggle switches!
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Gawd! Back in the early days (when I was all embedded, and only had 4K of ROM and 4K of RAM to play with) there were all the tricks: self modifying code, undocumented processor features (that only worked in the pre V3 hardware mask), hand tuned spaghetti assembler, all the kinds of things that I recoil from these days! Nowadays, all I have to do is pour the blood of a virgin sacrifice into the DVD drive and Windows does the rest... Mind you, you wouldn't believe how hard it is find that around here these days!
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
OriginalGriff wrote:
Back in the early days (when I was all embedded, and only had 4K of ROM and 4K of RAM to play with) there were all the tricks: self modifying code, undocumented processor features (that only worked in the pre V3 hardware mask), hand tuned spaghetti assembler, all the kinds of things that I recoil from these days!
And here I thought I had purged memories of debugging code where the original programmer was jumping into the middle of instructions hoping they'd be interpreted as NOPs just to save a byte here and there to make the game fit into a 2K ROM cartridge. I remember we tried jumping up and down on the chips, but it didn't make the bits fit any better, but we all felt better nonetheless.
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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I was just daydreaming and thinking about the differences between the HTTP GET and POST verbs (OK, I'm a little tired, OK? The mind wanders) and I suddenly remembered a trick I had to do in the wee early days of the internet when posting article content. We used to have to split the content into small chunks before sending it in the form postback, and then rebuild it on the server end. What sort of relatively recent stuff (this was 10 years ago) did you used to have to do to get your apps to work?
cheers Chris Maunder
Also related to very early days in Web programming. I remember we had a Sun Web Server that had to interact with some legacy system and we lacked connectivity libraries to it; however there was a command line tool that could process simple queries and dump them to the screen. We used a CGI C executable that piped and redirected the screen output of the command line tool. We had to parse the screen-based report to extract the data fields, but eventually managed to provide exactly what the customer was asking for. :cool:
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eBay!
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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OriginalGriff wrote:
eBay!
You know, part of the spam filters you should apply is your mind. If something is too good to be true... Virginity on auction, Really???
KP Lee wrote:
Virginity on auction, Really???
Yes, really...[^] :sigh:
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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KP Lee wrote:
Virginity on auction, Really???
Yes, really...[^] :sigh:
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
That's just like the E-mail that wants to send me $5000/wk until the $1m is disbursed to me. (or better yet, the $1.3) All I have to do is send my name and address and maybe some other harmless information like my Social Security Card # or my bank #, to get all this money sent to me. Generally because I'm a victim of a scam or they want me to help them steal the money for a generous split. I like the fact they intend to re-sell the virginity once it has been sold the first time. It's both amusing and sad to think how gullible they think I am. (Sad because: they do it because it is a profitable ploy.)
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Been there, did that on a DEC PDP-11/05 at school. The machine stored its 80 word bootstrap in a piece of core memory. Student programs routinely wiped the bootstrap due to an errant addressing mode or somesuch. I had to do it once or twice. One guy became legendary for his ability to enter the bootstrap in under 60 seconds. Of course, that doesn't say much for how he acquired the skill...
Software Zen:
delete this;Happily I only had to do it with one machine, an Altair 8800. Once I built a circuit to connect it to a Teletype ASR 33, I wrote the bootstrap program to load the OS from paper tape. Then I wrote the OS in stages, along with an Assembler. Once those got manually entered, I punched them all to tape and never had to enter anything that way again, except the bootstrap code. :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
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Happily I only had to do it with one machine, an Altair 8800. Once I built a circuit to connect it to a Teletype ASR 33, I wrote the bootstrap program to load the OS from paper tape. Then I wrote the OS in stages, along with an Assembler. Once those got manually entered, I punched them all to tape and never had to enter anything that way again, except the bootstrap code. :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
That's a familiar story. My stepdad had a COSMAC ELF single-board computer he built from a kit (he's a EE, so he knows which end of a soldering iron to hold). He added a KSR 33 teletype for I/O, and hand-assembled code to run it. We found a Tiny BASIC interpreter that would run on the board that was about 1.5K, so we spent a weekend fat-fingering it in on the board's hex keypad and debugging the I/O. After we got it working, he hooked up a car battery as a backup so that we wouldn't have to do that again.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
That's a familiar story. My stepdad had a COSMAC ELF single-board computer he built from a kit (he's a EE, so he knows which end of a soldering iron to hold). He added a KSR 33 teletype for I/O, and hand-assembled code to run it. We found a Tiny BASIC interpreter that would run on the board that was about 1.5K, so we spent a weekend fat-fingering it in on the board's hex keypad and debugging the I/O. After we got it working, he hooked up a car battery as a backup so that we wouldn't have to do that again.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary Wheeler wrote:
After we got it working, he hooked up a car battery as a backup so that we wouldn't have to do that again.
I wish I'd been smart enough to do that! During the initial development the power often blinked, which required me to start the hand loading process over again. After 4 or 5 restarts in a single evening (it was a night job, after classes, at a different Uni), the charm sorta wore off.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Gary Wheeler wrote:
After we got it working, he hooked up a car battery as a backup so that we wouldn't have to do that again.
I wish I'd been smart enough to do that! During the initial development the power often blinked, which required me to start the hand loading process over again. After 4 or 5 restarts in a single evening (it was a night job, after classes, at a different Uni), the charm sorta wore off.
Will Rogers never met me.
We cheated. The car battery was part of a battery-backup system he'd rigged for the sump pump in our basement. It only took a few mA to keep the thing running, especially since most of the board was CMOS.
Software Zen:
delete this;
